Re: Last Call: <draft-hoffman-tao4677bis-15.txt> (The Tao of IETF: A Novice's Guide to the Internet Engineering Task Force) to Informational RFC

[Yoav Nir <[e-mail]>]

Hi Peter

I tend to disagree. I am not a native English speaker, although I will admit to watching way too much American TV in my teens. 

I believe most of these should be recognizable to anyone who has learned enough English to participate meaningfully in IETF mailing lists and discussions. What you haven't seen before, you can usually either deduce ("cosmic significance" would obviously mean a lot of significance), or else easily searchable on the net or in idiom books, although I did get some incorrect results searching google for "warm fuzzy feeling".

Yes, we should keep both messages and documents straight-forward, and avoid cultural references and memes (like "home base" or "I do have a Dalek but I do not yet have a Tardis", or any reference to taking arrows to the knee), but I don't think it's necessary to go back and prune all idioms out of a document.

Yoav

On May 31, 2012, at 4:49 AM, Peter Saint-Andre wrote:

> Overall I continue to think that this is a helpful document, as were its
> predecessors.
> 
> That said, I would assume that many potential readers of this document
> are not native English speakers. Thus I suggest that the more colloquial
> words and phrases might best be changed to more standard English.
> Naturally one can quibble about particulars, but here are some examples
> as I see them:
> 
> "get into the swing of things"
> "give them a warm, fuzzy feeling"
> "happenings"
> "unsung heroes"
> "home base"
> "pet project"
> "pet peeve"
> "leaps and bounds"
> "get technical"
> "discussions of cosmic significance"
> "gatherings of the tribes"
> "kicks in"
> "breath of fresh air"
> "big-name"
> "take the pluge"
> 
> I realize that such words and phrases lend a friendly tone to the
> document, but IMHO that friendliness will be lost on non-native speakers.